Page 14 of Special Ops Seduction

“No sign of forced entry or struggle,” Oz said before anyone could ask the question. “It’s as if neither one of them was ever there.”

Jonas went back over every detail he carried around in his head about this particular operation. “The client is a highly placed academic with ties to the pharmaceuticalindustry. Could Sowande have decided the safe house wasn’t as safe as advertised?”

Though he’d been there when the scientist and his sister had walked through the little house. They hadn’t seemed anything but grateful. And deeply exhausted. Their reactions had been in line with what he’d expect to see in individuals who’d been through a traumatic experience and were wrestling with the possibility of hope—not runners.

But people were complicated.

“It’s possible something spooked them and they ran,” Isaac said. “But I wouldn’t expect the safe house to have no trace of them at all if that was the situation.”

The screen changed from Sowande’s face to their client, an older man who looked like what he was. Rich, white, intellectual, and used to getting his way. That his way in this case involved what was supposedly a safe landing space for a renowned biochemist whose work had entirely too many military applications didn’t change the basic facts. By the same token, those facts didn’t make their intellectual client a bad guy. Necessarily.

“Do we think this could be another kidnapping scenario?” Templeton asked, tipped back in his chair. He let out one of his booming laughs. “Or do we think the doctor and his sister decided that all things considered, they’d rather set their own ransom?”

It wouldn’t be the first time a victim had taken the reins like that, because why not make money on their own trouble if they could? But again, Jonas hadn’t gotten that feeling from the Sowandes.

His feelings weren’t always correct, of course. He just hadn’t been wrong in a long, long time.

“All questions I would like to have answered.” Isaac crossed his arms over his chest and frowned at the screen. “Here’s what we know. Sowande is a brilliant biochemist. His research involves the behavior of a compound colloquially known as SuperThrax, anthrax’s bigger, badder cousin.He first came to the attention of various branches of the U.S. government and military while he was an undergrad at MIT. They really sat up and took notice when he was doing his doctoral research at Harvard. Throw in a few fellowships and postdocs and what you have in Sowande is the world expert on a new form of chemical warfare.”

“So what you’re saying,” Blue said, sitting back in his chair, “is that our scientist is a popular guy.”

“He’s not just popular, he’s the prom king,” Isaac replied. “But he disappeared three days before he was supposed to deliver a paper at an international conference in Osaka, Japan. The buzz was, he was going to rip the field wide open.”

“What he was,” Jonas interjected, “was scared.”

“More than scared,” Bethan agreed.

Jonas allowed himself to look in her direction because this was work. This was part of the mission. This had nothing to do with regrets or memories or conversations he should have known better than to try to have on a cold beach. Alone. With no buffer between them.

“I got the distinct impression that while his sister was furious about what was happening, Sowande himself was more... beaten down,” Jonas said, and told himself the tension in his voice was about their missing scientist, nothing more. “He repeatedly described himself as an academic, not a soldier. Not someone who wanted anything to do with weapons.”

“The sister was furious?” Lucas King asked in a considering sort of voice. “Maybe that’s what doesn’t track? Wasn’t the expectation that she would be a wreck?”

“I would say she was both,” Bethan replied in that steady, even way of hers that Jonas always admired when it was aimed at someone else. “Those men drugged her and kept her knocked out after they found her in São Paulo, and she doesn’t know how long it took for them to transport her to the Atacama. She also has no way to tell what they didto her. And yet throughout her ordeal, she didn’t give up her brother. That takes a certain level of fortitude.”

“Are we interested in finding out where she came by this fortitude?” Griffin asked from his preferred position, with his back against a different wall.

“We’re interested in everything about this case,” Isaac replied. “No detail too big or small when there’s potential chemical warfare in play. But the client swears that the safe house was clean. No one except him knew the Sowandes were coming, no one knew when they arrived in Canada, and he swears that on top of that, no one even knew that the residence was a safe house in the first place.”

“On our end, we swept the house, made sure there were no eyes on it, and triple-checked the access points.” Jonas stood still and sure, not putting on a show of fidgeting the way Templeton did. “It would take a pretty high level of tactical ability to enter at all, much less enter and then leave with two potentially unwilling adults.”

“Maybe the question to ask is if we trust our client,” Bethan said. “Was this a distress call or step one in covering his tracks?”

Isaac shrugged. “Would I trust the guy to have my back? No. Do I trust that he’s probably telling the truth as it relates to an asset I’m pretty sure he was going to use to make money on in one way or another? Sure. I’ll trust that. To an extent.”

Everyone started talking then, debating how much trust they could or should put into a client like this one. Intellectual, sure, but he didn’t write poetry. He was deeply involved in an industry that could too easily be used to profit off the terrible wars and less publicized, sometimes more hideous skirmishes that everyone in this room had fought.

Jonas studied the image on the screen, now the biochemical makeup of SuperThrax. It never ceased to amaze him that people started down paths like the one their scientist had only to discover that at the end of it was a weaponthat could be used for only one purpose—war. Killing humans on a grand scale. What had Sowande thought studying agents of chemical warfare would lead to?

He’d known people like this all his life. Standing on a path that was clearly signposted, baffled and a little outraged that it led exactly where it said it would. But that felt a little too much like diving into another part of his past he had no intention of revisiting, so Jonas shoved that aside.

“I want to know who hired the individuals we met in the desert,” he said when there was a lull in the conversation. “It seems to me that they were working too hard to seem less cohesive than they actually were.”

“They didn’t make sense,” Griffin agreed. “Bethan walked right into that house, but they took the trouble to wire up the whole town? Who were they expecting?”

Bethan nodded. “And if they were expecting us, why did they blow up an outlying shed? It was a diversionary tactic at best, but it didn’t divert anything. So why not actually come for us?”

“Here’s a question,” Templeton said after a moment. “Did you get a sense that the sister was orchestrating the whole thing?”

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